The agreement is only as good as the hospital’s vetting, so I may be a little optimistic after seeing a very thorough and protracted process on my side. If you work for a healthcare system that’s okay with Beacon and Oracle, then it may be time to evaluate whether they’re a good healthcare system to work for.

Medical AI has guardrails out the wazoo. By the time it’s made available to a physician, it’s probably been reviewed by a council, vetted by IT, and negotiated heavily by Legal. If the data leaves the premises, it’ll be thoroughly protected and isolated.

That said, fuck AI. I’d give up medical transcription to get the environment, economy, and sanity back. Musk’s data center is running dozens of natural gas turbines in a low-income, primarily Black neighborhood 11 miles down the road from St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. It’s positively ghoulish.

Somebody once tried to sell a box that would cancel all your streaming services and only fire the account back up for a month at a time when you wanted to stream something. It was a phenomenal idea with a genuine problem worth solving, completely torpedoed by the fact of the box costing $400 up front and I think requiring its own subscription.

I used one a million years ago when I was a teenager and I hated it because it legit sounded like a lawnmower. Are they still so insanely loud?

• Michael Scott

Lost wasn’t trying to be ridiculous, but got close. Damon Lindelof is a terrible writer who thinks “mystery” means “random unexplainable bullshit”.

David Lynch was doing it on purpose.

My approach:

Get really comfortable, making sure nothing is off balance, applying unneeded pressure, or likely to lead to soreness later. Make sure it’s not too bright, too noisy, too warm or cold. Then from head to toe, take stock of your body state and relax every muscle. Let your shoulders sink, your hands open, neck loosen. Sink into the bed. Exhale and you should feel like a pile of noodles.

Then just listen to your own breathing. Don’t breathe deeply, just breathe comfortably. Listen to the sound. The goal is literally to bore yourself to sleep. If you catch yourself thinking, stop. Just go back to the breathing. Don’t count, manage, or time anything. Just relax and breathe, listening to the air moving.

Hopefully, the next step is to wake up.

I’ve talked for years about something I call the Cupholder Quotient. Number of cupholders divided by number of people seated comfortably in a car. Greater than one is good. It’s an off the cuff measurement of a car’s design quality and it tends to be pretty accurate. The more cups a car is designed to support per passenger, the more likely the designers were empathically considering how the vehicle might be used from the passengers’ perspective.

I think the ex-fascists subgroup you mentioned, addressed in this question, is actually representative of intrinsic critical thinkers whose nature overcame their upbringing. These I think are quite natural lemmings (a particularly ironic name).

Only note: it’s capitalism that selects for sociopaths in leadership roles.

Publicize the costs, privatize the profits!

I saw the photo first before I read the parent comment and was mightily confused at why there were Weird Al hairstyling videos. The priming effect at work.

Also, he should title his next album Weird AI

Delete social media.

Buy a pocket sized e-reader. I recommend options from Bigme and XTEink.

Learn to reach for books instead of apps.

Some additional nuance that I didn’t see yet: there’s a specific meaning to the command or the future tense of hauling ass, as that usage tends to imply the need for haste, specifically to hurry, e.g., “we gotta haul ass”. However, in the past or subjunctive tense, it tends to mean great speed without necessarily implying anxiety or haste - the speed could be entirely innate and casual - e.g., “they were really hauling ass” or “this thing can really haul ass”.

Enshittification 101, right there.

All I’m hearing is “tricorder on the way”

Probably sharing only the negative profits, so, uh, more taxes, everybody!

Intellectual property thief is confidently wrong about a task he has no right or expertise to be performing anyway. The LLM didn’t fall far from the tree.

Include an unprotected exhaust vent in the trench.